Last trip i took i took my laptop with me so every evening i could dump the pictures/movies from my camera and GoPro on to an external Hard Drive. This laptop traveled with us for over 4000km and survived the trip flawlessly. But, at the end of the day it's still a laptop with a standard HDD so it's bound to break sooner or later.

So with the advances in technology, a tablet seems like a gift from the heavens. light, flash-memory, perfect for checking mails and some reading,...

A lot of these tablets lately have usb ports to them so it would serve a solution for the only big problem i still have. i need to get a couple of gigs of data from one place to another every night. The closed UI structure of these things don't seem to be very keen on that out of the box so i was wondering if anybody rigged their tablet to make this possible in any way.

I have the Galaxy Tab 10.1, no dedicated USB port, but it does have an adapter to plug one in. 16G hardrive, no space to expand.... I will be getting a USB splitter/hub so I can plug my SD card reader and either a larger flash drive or smaller hard drive in to transfer photos for back up. Most tablets, as long as there is some external port will have the ability to move files around.

You could look for a tablet with OTG USB but the most simple way is a tablet with a SD slot. Remove the flash card from your device, open the file broswer app (if the device doesn't have one as is, install a 3rd party app) and copy/paste your files.

But...you usually put a SD card into a tablet to boost its capacity...not to empty the card into the tablet. 64GB of capacity isn't that "big" if you start to drop a lot of vids on it. To me, you better buy a bunch of SD cards for your video/photo devices instead and remove them when they are full. Or keep the laptop/netbook solution.

My Samsung S3 phone accepts an OTG USB cable that you can put a memory card reader into, and the phone has a slot for an expansion SD card up to 64GB. There are obviously tablets that do the same.
I even found that I can plug a USB floppy disk drive in and it works.
A few months back I found a battery powered external hard disk that had memory card slots in it. Just plug the camera card in, and it automatically backs it up. The hard disk can be attached to a PC as an external disk at any time to retrieve the photos, or just used as an external disk for other backup. Let me know if you are interested and i'll dig up the info on it.

I haven't used one myself, but it's basically an SD card with a built-in WiFi adapter. You can then transfer files over a WiFi network to a host PC (I beleive peer-to-peer networking is also supported, so you don't need a 'hotspot'), and works with many photo-sharing sites as well (SmugMug, Picasa, etc...) to automatically upload photos. There is an Android and iOS app as well, which should allow you to transfer the files from the card to the tablet (maybe directly to the memory card), though I'm not familiar with all the functionality of the app.

What some of these other guys said. The most storage you can get in a tablet is the new 128GB iPad. Or you can get a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 with 32GB built in and add a 64GB microSD, for 96GB total.

But, what's the point in either of those? You may as well just buy some microSD cards and use them in your GoPro (or whatever) and take them out and keep them (versus transferring the files to a tablet). If you transfer them to a tablet that has no microSD slot, you'll run out of space quickly. If you are using the tablet to transfer files from your GoPro microSD to the tablet's microSD, you're not really doing anything but wasting time - 'cause in the end, you still just have the files on a microSD card.

OTOH, if you get a Note 10.1 (and there are others, too, I just know what I have) and an external USB drive (and the right Samsung adapter), you can take the microSD out of your GoPro, put it in your tablet, and then use the tablet to move the files from the microSD to your (large) external USB drive.

But, since your original purpose was to eliminate use of an actual hard drive, that doesn't really seem to fix anything for you.

I faced the same problem for storing my multimedia data whilst traveling and decided the best solution for me was a 240Gb OCZ SSD HDD in USB 3.0 housing with a Samsung Chromebook 2012 (8 sec boot time, nice keyboard, Dimensions (WxDxH): 289.6 x 208.5 x 17.5 mm; Weight: 1.1 Kg), cost for the package is around £320/355 Euro.

or

If your laptop is reasonably light another option would be to upgrade your laptops HDD to an SSD HDD something like OCZ 240GB Vertex Plus SSDis £89/100 Euro, you'd get the benefit of the faster SSD all the time.

or
If you're not away for long, just buy/borrow a handful of 16 and 32 SD/MicroSD cards, wait until you get back to transfer and use a mobile phone for checking email/surfing.

Another option would be to replace the hard drive in your laptop with a solid state hard drive. They are not cheap, but less than the cost of a good tablet, and do seem to be coming down in cost a bit. That would give you the durability of a tablet with the potential of much more storage capacity. You will also find that your laptop will run much faster.

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The shortest distance between two points is boring.

I debated this same issue recently; my need is to have space for video from my GoPro. In the end, I decided that I can just carry a pile of SD cards for the GoPro and not worry about downloading them until I'm home. I could not find a tablet that had sufficient storage space available to make it a storage device on its own, and carrying added gear negated the size advantage of the tablet versus the notebook computer. Uploading via wifi to remote storage can be slow and is dependent on finding a hotspot (which are seemingly absent out in the backcountry ). When I do find a hotspot on the road, I'm usually not inclined to sit and upload hours of video files, I usually just check in with email and such and get on my way again. I can hotspot from my phone as well, but moving large files would end up costing a fortune in data charges, and again is dependent upon a cell signal which is often absent in the backcountry also.

My final decision: I got a Nexus 7 tablet as it is small enough to tuck into my tankbag for travelling. I'm watching the sales for good deals on SD cards. Quite often the 16G class 10 cards come up for under $20 and sometimes for as low as $12-14 for good name brand cards. I have about six all ready and figure another 6-10 will do me.

Cool replies guys, i'm investigating the suggestions given. A couple of details:
My gopro is indeed based on SD cards but my camera (canon 7D) uses CF cards, so i would have to use a usb based external card reader any way.

On my last trip the amount of collected data was over 350GB (time-lapse photography and movies take up a lot of space ;) )

I do have a connection to my NAS from anywhere in the world and when i have the chance to get a solid internet connection i could take advantage of that for some of it but i would like to set up a "in the middle of nowhere" scenario and see what my options would be worse case :)

Cool replies guys, i'm investigating the suggestions given. A couple of details:
My gopro is indeed based on SD cards but my camera (canon 7D) uses CF cards, so i would have to use a usb based external card reader any way.

I do have a connection to my NAS from anywhere in the world and when i have the chance to get a solid internet connection i could take advantage of that for some of it but i would like to set up a "in the middle of nowhere" scenario and see what my options would be worse case :)

FTP? The EyeFi I linked above will transfer to an FTP location, but via a host (PC or Smartphone/Tablet connected to WiFi network), so you can upload back to your home NAS.